Table of Contents

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CBS News/Vanity Fair Monthly Poll #1, January 2010 (ICPSR 31162)

Principal Investigator(s):CBS News

Summary:

This poll, fielded January 6-10, 2010, is a part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicits public opinion on the presidency and on a range of other political and social issues. Respondents were asked whether they approved of the way Barack Obama was handling his job as president, the economy, the war in Afghanistan, health care, and the threat of terrorism. Respondents were queried on what they thought was the most important problem facing the United States, how they would rate the condition of the national economy, whether they t... (more info)

This poll, fielded January 6-10, 2010, is a part of a continuing series of monthly surveys that solicits public opinion on the presidency and on a range of other political and social issues. Respondents were asked whether they approved of the way Barack Obama was handling his job as president, the economy, the war in Afghanistan, health care, and the threat of terrorism. Respondents were queried on what they thought was the most important problem facing the United States, how they would rate the condition of the national economy, whether they thought the economy was getting better or worse, and whether they approved of the way that the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress were handling health care. Respondents were also asked whether they thought health care reform was going too far in trying to provide health insurance to as many Americans as possible, in trying to control cost, and in trying to regulate the health insurance industry. Information was collected on whether respondents' thought that Guantanamo Prison should continue to operate, whether they favored or opposed mandatory testing of students in public schools each year to determine how well the school is educating students, whether they thought students should be required to learn a foreign language in order to graduate from high school, and whether they thought that teachers in public schools were paid too much, too little, or just the right amount. Respondents were asked whether they had children that attended school, what type of school their children attended, what grade they would give to the quality of their children's education, whether they thought their children's education was better or worse than the education they received. Information was collected on how much respondents' children studied, whether they thought that it was important for their children's school curriculum to include arts, music and physical education, whether they thought that their children would attend college, and whether they thought that their children's school was properly preparing them for college. Respondents were also asked to rate the United States on its ability to protect the country from terrorist attacks, how likely they thought it was that there would be another terrorist attack in the United States within the next few months, whether they were afraid of flying, whether they thought that it was justified for people of certain racial or ethnic groups to be subjected to additional security checks at airports, and whether they thought that X-ray machines should be used to scan the bodies of travelers at airports. Finally respondents were asked a number of miscellaneous questions including what their New Year's resolution was, what their favorite season was, who they thought was the top athletic role model, who they thought was the most important American contributor to literature, what place and time period they would most like to return to, and how often they fly. Demographic information includes sex, age, race, marital status, education level, household income, military service, religious preference, type of residential area (e.g., urban or rural), political party affiliation, political philosophy, and voter registration status.

Universe:
Persons aged 18 years and older living in households with telephones in the United States.

Data Types:
survey data

Data Collection Notes:

The data available for download are not weighted and users will need to weight the data prior to analysis.

The CASEID variable was reformatted in order to make it a unique identifier.

Truncated value label in variables Q63 and EDUC were corrected.

Variable Q3 contains a truncated value label.

This data collection was produced by CBS News, New York, NY.

Methodology

Sample:
A variation of random-digit dialing (RDD) using primary sampling units (PSUs) was employed, consisting of blocks of 100 telephone numbers identical through the eighth digit and stratified by geographic region, area code, and size of place. Phone numbers were dialed from RDD samples of both standard land-lines and cell phones. Within households, respondents were selected using a method developed by Leslie Kish and modified by Charles Backstrom and Gerald Hursh (see Backstrom and Hursh, SURVEY RESEARCH. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963).

Weight:
The data contain weight variables that should be used in analyzing the data. According to the CBS News Web site, the data were weighted to match United States Census Bureau breakdowns on age, sex, race, education, and region of the country. The data were also adjusted for the fact that people who share a telephone with others have less chance to be contacted than people who live alone and have their own telephones, and that households with more than one telephone number have more chances to be called than households with only one telephone number.

Mode of Data Collection:
telephone interview

Extent of Processing: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of
disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major
statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to
these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: